in language and behavior. Upon reunion with their parents, children displayed parentified behaviors—either caretaking or punitive and controlling—in order to maintain proximity, while dealing with the threat the parents posed. Family drawings included skeletons, dismembered body parts, or figures scratched out. When presented with a Polaroid, they became wordless, irrational, or distressed.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARENTING STYLES AND ATTACHMENT STYLES
In laymen’s terms, as adults, we set ourselves up by finding relationships that confirm our early models, even when these patterns are not in our own self-interest. For example, in a romantic relationship, the person with an ambivalent attachment may need to be with his or her partner all the time to gain reassurance. To support this perception of reality, they choose someone who is isolated and hard to connect with: “See? If I didn’t hound him all the time, he’d never express his feelings or show me affection.” The person with a model of avoidant attachment has the tendency to choose someone who is possessive or overly demanding of attention, from whom he or she constantly needs to escape: “See? I have to be distant, otherwise her constant hounding would suck me dry.” These cyclical patterns leave one in a constant state of grief over lost and/or failed relationships. They also render us susceptible to complicated grief, particularly in the event of death and/or severe trauma.
Implicit versus explicit learning and attachment
These theories would seem to suggest that we spend our whole adult lives reliving our childhood dramas, like a song stuck on repeat. But this supposition is flawed for two reasons. First, memory is not a thing. Your heart is an object but the pulse it generates is a physiological event; it occupies no space and has no mass. Second, memory is not only mutable, but the nature of the brain’s storage mechanisms dictates that memories must change over time (Lewis et al., 2000). Our love maps are determined at the crossroads of implicit versus explicit learning. Lewis et al. (2000, p.103) state:
The physiology of memory determines the heart of who we are and who we can become…the plasticity of the mind, its capacity to adapt and learn, is possible only because neuronal connections can change… The stability of an individual mind—what we know as identity—exists only because some neural pathways endure.
Explicit learning encodes memories of events including autobiographical recollections and discrete facts. This is commonly described as our conscious perceptions. However, there is a wealth of learning human beings absorb without being consciously aware of it; this is implicit learning. We tend to give greater credence to explicit knowledge of facts, but this is misplaced, as evidenced by distorted eye-witness accounts, and those small moments of, “Huh, I remember it differently.”
For example, Mr. Underwood suffered catastrophic damage to his hippocampus, destroying his explicit memory and leaving him perpetually living in the present. Researchers taught Mr. Underwood to braid, a skill he did not have prior to suffering brain damage. After he had mastered it, researchers asked him if he knew how to braid. He replied, “No,” a truthful statement from his perspective. But when three strips of cloth were placed in front of him, he wove them together without hesitation.
When it comes to engaging in relationships, overwhelmingly, it is this mysterious, implicit learning mechanism—our unconscious knowledge—that tends to take charge. If your parents have a dysfunctional relationship, this will produce implicit schema, planting an erroneous generality in a child’s brain. Your unconscious knowledge “distills but does not evaluate” how applicable the early lessons of family life are to the larger adult world. Recall, Hendrix pointed out that a person’s composite imago image only etches certain data “onto a template,” without interpretation. This appears detrimental, because a child, in the absence of understanding his love map in the context of its conception, might grow up to make poor decisions in love. However, it also creates an opportunity for the adult to recontextualize his love map with the help of mature experiences.
In other words, as an adult, you might act childish at times, but you are no longer a child. Parts of you have grown and matured in spite of those wounds you still carry, and those mature parts provide you with the tools required to achieve personal insight. Insight allows for change. And change allows for the revision and integration of maladaptive patterns. And that will guide you through the quicksand of grief.
The essential artist
Where talk therapy alone falls short
I’ve described the grieving process as an opportunity for the “revision” of attachment disturbances several times, but what exactly does that mean? A reasonable person might assume analyzing pivotal moments in childhood will resolve his troubles, turning talk therapy into “a treasure hunt for the explicit past.” Autobiographical memories are useful, but “explicit memory is not a shrine” (Lewis et al., 2000).People rely on the rational mind to solve problems, and are naturally baffled when it proves useless to effect emotional change (Lewis et al., 2000).
Recounting a timeline of your past alone will not navigate you out of these muddy waters. You have to engage in relationships, see what comes up in the present, and be able to withstand the discomfort of when your wires cross with your partner’s—long enough, at least, to determine the origin of the conflict, and whether or not it is rectifiable. Keep in mind, those wires can change, but not when left alone in isolation. And not if you only talk about it. Talk therapy alone falls short for three reasons:
1.Most talk therapies are ego based, which means they rely on your conscious mind to have insight. But insight alone is passive, it doesn’t change patterns, merely allows for the possibility of change. Because it is partly unconscious, your true self is by nature unknowable in its entirety, and thus you cannot think and talk your way to wholeness. Yet the thinking self is obsessed with remaining in control and struggles to accept what it does not understand. If given free reign, it will spin around in passive, insightful circles rather than allowing an intuitive, implicit awareness to become a transformative libidinal force.
2.Because most talk therapies are ego based, they are ill equipped to provide affective learning experiences. Affective experiences are those that stimulate us physically and emotionally. Emotions are always connected to the body because sensations are the first form emotions take, and are often expressed through the body (such as with anxiety). Affective learning thus becomes meaningful learning, which is essential to mental and emotional growth. This in turn bolsters the ego in a positive way, making it more flexible and better able to hold opposing ideas at the same time, which allows for abstraction, complex emotions, and a deeper understanding of those emotions. Unless therapy activates and/or acknowledges the body in some fashion, it won’t be affectively effective (Maisel and Raeburn, 2008; Ogden, Minton, and Pain, 2006; Satir, 1988; van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth, 1996).
3.The language of talk therapy is subject to “the reductionism of words.” It is easiest to understand this concept when comparing the language of the ego to the language of the unconscious, which is one of somatic experiences, images, symbols, and metaphors. We go to therapy to examine pressures and motivations we experience but do not understand, using ineffective tools. It’s like trying to repair a leaky roof with a hammer that has no head. Or going to a foreign country where you do not speak the language and make no effort to learn it, but still expect one day to wake up fluent. Words are essential to integrating unconscious symbols into our conscious awareness, but we must first be willing and able to set aside the thinking-mind (sometimes referred to as “monkey mind”), which communicates in a language of words, in order for unconscious material to emerge, through an entirely different form of communication (Robbins, 1994; Welwood, 2000).
Creative arts therapists have been working with a language that appeals to the unconscious and provides affective experiences for years. It is a language of the body, metaphors, images, and symbols. Arthur Robbins (1994, p.4), author of A Multi-Modal Approach To Creative Art Therapy, states:
Symbol
